{"slug": "show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane", "title": "Show HN: Deputies (open-source background agent control plane)", "summary": "Deputies, an open-source control plane for background coding agents, was launched on Hacker News. It runs on existing infrastructure with a Node API, Postgres database, and React frontend, allowing teams to hand off engineering work to agents while maintaining visibility and control. The platform supports sandboxed agent sessions triggered via web UI, Slack, GitHub, or webhooks.", "body_md": "## Assign work\n\nSend a prompt from the web UI, Slack, GitHub, or a webhook.\n\nDeputies is an open source control plane for background coding agents, powered by\n[Flue](https://flueframework.com/). It runs on your\nexisting infrastructure: a Node API, Postgres database, and static React frontend.\n\nRun agents in sandboxes tailored to your dev environment, with the right repositories, tools, services, and context sources attached.\n\nSend a prompt from the web UI, Slack, GitHub, or a webhook.\n\nDeputies manages the sandbox, work queue, logs, services, and artifacts.\n\nInspect the transcript, open tools, download artifacts, and follow up.\n\nQueue a follow-up, publish a pull request, or merge the finished work.\n\nTry Deputies\n\nLog into the public demo to create real sessions, or use the embedded snapshot below to see the interface without signing in.\n\nRead-only snapshot\n\nThis embedded static demo is a read-only snapshot of prior agent work. It is separate from the live public demo above.\n\nWhat you can do\n\nToday\n\nComing soon\n\nArchitecture\n\nDeputies keeps the web UI, API, worker, database, object storage, and sandbox provider boundaries explicit so the same system can grow from a quick monolith into a production-ready multi-service deployment.\n\nFAQ\n\nA [background agent](https://background-agents.com/) is an AI\ncoding agent that runs asynchronously instead of sitting inside your terminal. You hand it a task, it works in its\nown environment, and you come back to review progress, artifacts, logs, callbacks, and the final result.\n\nDeputies is built for teams that want to hand off real engineering work to agents while keeping visibility, access control, history, callbacks, and deployment concerns in one place. Inbound events can trigger new work, and recurring tasks can turn the system from a passive queue into something more proactive.\n\nTools like [Conductor](https://www.conductor.build/) and [Solo](https://soloterm.com/) make local coding-agent workflows easier to manage: multiple sessions, terminals, worktrees, and prompts running\nfrom an individual developer's machine. That is useful, but it is still centered on one user's interactive environment.\n\nDeputies is aimed at the next layer: background-agent infrastructure for teams. Agent sessions run in managed sandboxes, persist beyond a laptop session, expose shared history and artifacts, and can be triggered by external systems like issues, CI failures, alerts, or schedules.\n\nThe space includes open-source projects like\n[Open-Inspect](https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agents)\nand\n[Open SWE](https://github.com/langchain-ai/open-swe),\nhosted or enterprise-oriented products like OpenHands*, Ona, and Devin, and vendor-native cloud agents like\nClaude Code and OpenAI Codex. Deputies is another take on the same broad category, with a stronger focus on\nself-hostable deployment alongside your existing infrastructure.\n\n* Much of OpenHands is open source, but its Cloud and Enterprise code includes source-available features like multi-user support, RBAC and permissions, collaboration, integrations, and self-hosted cloud deployment.\n\nBackground agents need access to your code, secrets, development environments, issue trackers, and deploy workflows. Open source lets you self-host the control plane inside the same security boundary as your other systems, while keeping it inspectable, auditable, and adaptable to the deployment patterns your team already uses.\n\nIt also gives you an escape hatch. You can change integrations, add providers, debug the full system, and connect to non-standard internal systems with custom adapters instead of waiting for a vendor or treating the agent runtime as a black box.\n\nDeputies works with ChatGPT Pro through `@earendil-works/pi-ai/oauth`\n\n, because Flue uses Pi under the\nhood. Any LLM provider supported by Pi should be supported by Deputies, or at least be easy to add.\n\nAfter working with and extending Open-Inspect and Open SWE, I was excited by the background-agent workflow but frustrated by their deployment constraints. Open-Inspect is tied to Cloudflare, while Open SWE pushes users toward LangChain's hosted LangSmith platform.\n\nWhen [Flue](https://flueframework.com/) came out, it looked like\nthe right foundation for my take on a background agent: one built with deployability front and center. These systems\nshould run wherever the rest of your infrastructure already runs, so teams can keep secure access patterns intact\nwithout introducing a new deployment model.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane", "canonical_source": "https://deputies.dev/", "published_at": "2026-06-17 15:40:06+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-17 15:53:24.037444+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Deputies", "Flue", "OpenHands", "Conductor", "Solo", "Open-Inspect", "Open SWE", "Claude Code"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-deputies-open-source-background-agent-control-plane.jsonld"}}